A thin film transistor liquid crystal display (briefly referred to as TFT-LCD) dominates a field of flat panel display technology, and attracts more attention, due to characteristics such as small size, low power consumption and no radiation.
In the prior art, manufacturing of a thin film transistor generally requires to respectively perform patterning processes on a gate metal layer, a gate insulating layer, an active layer and a source-drain metal layer by using a mask, and each of the patterning processes includes coating photoresist, exposing, developing, etching, stripping, etc.
Thus, the number of the patterning processes is too many, which will directly lead to an increased product cost and a decreased capacity in mass production, and therefore how to further reduce the number of the patterning processes has become a problem of growing concern.